The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,311 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,399 out of 20311
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20311
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20311
20311 movie reviews
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  1. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    This new version is mindless hot-rodding fun, especially for those with a weakness for vintage cars hurtling down city streets, a group whose members include -- sigh -- me.
  2. Malevolence
    Malevolence will lead Halloween-inspired viewers into this dark place for some palpitations, but the thrills will come from sheer density of gruesome images, not from frightfully new ideas.
  3. Stealing Harvard
    Together, Mr. Lee and Mr. Green have a daft comic energy, and they are assisted by game performances from the rest of the cast.
  4. Show Me Love
    The film has some charm and a winning simplicity but not an iota of depth.
  5. Raising Helen
    A soft-hearted, squishy-minded prototype for a network sitcom, is mildly ingratiating but never laugh-out-loud funny. Even Ms. Hudson's intrepid radiance can't camouflage the premise's leaky foundation.
  6. Anything But Love
    A pleasant, good-natured picture that struggles, gallantly if vainly, to recapture the style and sensibility of a studio musical on the severely limited budget of an independent film.
  7. Bush's Brain
    Whether or not Bush's Brain makes its case against Mr. Rove, the movie leaves you with the sickening feeling that it's no longer possible in American politics to stay out of the gutter unless, of course, you want to lose. Dirty politics work.
  8. Nico and Dani
    Amazingly, Cesc Gay's delicate but unblinking film Nico and Dani succeeds in capturing and sustaining the fragile emotional climate of curiosity, fear, innocence and prurience that surrounds adolescent sexual experimentation.
  9. Kiss the Girls
    Mr. Freeman projects a kindness, patience and canny intelligence that cut against the movie's fast pace and pumped-up shock effects. His performance is so measured it makes you want to believe in the movie much more than its gimmicky jerry-built plot ever permits.
  10. Van Helsing
    Despite the rococo obsessiveness of its special effects and its voracious sampling of past horror movies, Van Helsing is mostly content to offer warmed-over allusions and secondhand thrills.
  11. King Arthur
    Luckily there is an element of broad, brawny camp that prevents King Arthur from being a complete drag.
  12. The Clearing
    Mr. Brugge has perhaps succeeded in avoiding vulgar melodrama, but he has hit on something far worse -- a bloodless melodrama, with bottled water running in its veins.
  13. EuroTrip
    The mildly xenophobic humor includes one of the few inventive mime insults seen in a movie; Eurotrip may be stupid, but it's not dumb.
  14. Noi the Albino
    After a while the movie spins its wheels, unable to find much emotional traction in the icy bleakness.
  15. Old School
    Like a half-empty glass of Coke that's been sitting out for a couple of days; sure, it looks like cola, but one sip tells you exactly what's missing.
  16. Party Monster
    His (Culkin's) performance is earnest and brave, but also mannered when it should be un-self-conscious, and awkward when grace is called for.
  17. The Perfect Storm
    The Perfect Storm is no "Titanic."
  18. Shark Tale
    Reasonably good fun, even if, in the end, it's not really very interesting.
  19. Signs
    Mr. Shyamalan never gives us anything to believe in, other than his own power to solve problems of his own posing, and his command of a narrative logic is as circular -- and as empty -- as those bare patches out in the cornfield.
  20. WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
    Unfortunately, his (Schechter) uneven, unpolished documentary, WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, takes on far too many antagonists.
  21. The American Astronaut
    Soars as much as it crashes.
  22. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
    Modest, mildly engaging film.
  23. BASEketball
    Essentially two movies stuck together like chewing gum on a subway platform. One is a dumber-than-dumb teen comedy crammed with farcical sight-gags and raunchy adolescent humor, the other a no-holds-barred satire of professional sports, and the greed, egotism and pomposity surrounding them.
  24. Michael Jordan to the Max
    The format and the purposeful blandness of the script make Jordan seem remote, more icon than human being.
  25. The Green Butchers
    A movie in search of a theme. Svend and Bjarne aren't bad or uninteresting characters, and certainly the two talented actors playing them are inherently watchable. But there's too little meat on these bones.
  26. May
    Led by Ms. Bettis's discreetly campy May, the performances are a cut or two above what you would find in the average slasher film. But in the end that's all it is.
  27. Malibu's Most Wanted
    Any movie that lumps Mr. O'Neal, Ms. Derek and Snoop Dogg (as the voice of a gangsta-rap answer to Stuart Little) under the same title can't be all bad.
  28. Dude, Where's My Car?
    Tasteless at times, but where's the yuck?
  29. What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
    Once upon a time this was known as "the power of positive thinking," and it didn't involve nearly so much math.
  30. Big Fish
    The most curious thing about this magical-realist fable...is how thin and soft it is, how unpersuasive and ultimately forgettable even its most strenuous inventions turn out to be.
  31. The Grudge
    Less scary than creepy, The Grudge may have lost some oomph in the translation from Japanese to English, and the desire for a PG-13 rating probably muted the violence and perhaps the scares.
  32. Jackie Brown
    But for all its enthusiasm, this film isn't sharp enough to afford all the time it wastes on small talk, long drives, trips to the mall and favorite songs played on car radios.
  33. Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
    A programmer that once upon a time would have played on the bottom half of double bills, Anacondas has no pretensions and gets its little job done effectively, providing some small-scale laughs and chills for the late summer season.
  34. Beyond the Sea
    Beyond the Sea, with all its gaping faults, is the genuine article. It succeeds in being deeply and sincerely insincere.
  35. De-Lovely
    A movie so lifeless and drained of genuine joie de vivre it makes you long for the largely fictional earlier film.
  36. The Day After Tomorrow
    The glacierization of half of the world's inhabited land is contemplated with barely a hint of horror. In fact, it looks kind of cool.
  37. Goodbye Lenin!
    Much too long. It starts to feel like a flabby, dramatic version of the first "Austin Powers" movie, another exercise in living anachronism as a storytelling device. By the time the picture's final note about German reunification is struck, "Lenin!" has raised a wall of indifference for the audience.
  38. Grand Theft Parsons
    Parsons himself might have written a surreal, funny-sad ballad about the aftermath of his own death, but Grand Theft Parsons is little more than a surreal anecdote, told in too much detail and without enough soul or imagination to make anything more than a footnote to a legend.
  39. Justice
    Generally low-key and likable, thanks mainly to a talented cast.
  40. New York Minute
    Polished and bouncy without being overly mawkish or unduly obnoxious. Above all, it is short.
  41. Raise Your Voice
    Ms. Duff's screen presence and the film's infectious high spirits will make this piece of fluff appealing to young moviegoers without conveying any sinister messages
  42. Remember the Titans
    If Remember the Titans is corny, it's unabashedly, even generously so.
  43. The Sea Inside
    The film fails to convey the claustrophobic terror experienced by a man who called his book "Letters From Hell."
  44. Peau d'homme coeur de bête
    Although it leaves you with a knot in your stomach, its power is undercut by its own head-banging obviousness.
  45. Thirteen
    Ms. Wood's performance bounces with mood swings from anxiety to exhilaration in a movie with moments so realistically painted that your eyes will sting from the fumes.
  46. Code 46
    The movie's atmosphere is, in many ways, more interesting than its story. Mr. Robbins and Ms. Morton are not the warmest actors. He can be mannered and smug, and she often seems to beam her performances from a strange, private mental universe.
  47. Amy
    Warm of heart, modest in polish, Amy provides satisfactions that must be balanced against its flaws.
  48. Silver City
    Nobody in it seems organically connected to anybody else. In a movie devoted to the idea that everything and everyone is connected, this is a serious failing, and it undermines Mr. Sayles's noble intentions.
  49. Bend It Like Beckham
    Its cheery inoffensiveness, though, is in some ways disappointing.
  50. 13 Going on 30
    The performances give the movie more flavor and life than the situation does; it often feels like prechewed Bubble Yum.
  51. Finding Neverland
    A handsome-looking film about the writer and his unripe inspirations, the actor Johnny Depp neither soars nor crashes, but moseys forward with vague purpose and actorly restraint.
  52. The Chamber
    Timing does no favors for The Chamber, the John Grisham death row drama that arrives on the heels of a better death row film (''Dead Man Walking'') and a better Grisham adaptation (''A Time to Kill''). But this film's also-ran aspects are partly offset by Gene Hackman's superlative performance.
  53. The Jackal
    The Jackal, like most expensive thrillers nowadays, knows how to do gadgets, pyrotechnics, underground subway chases and panicked crowd scenes. But except for Mr. Gere's uphill battle, it has only the vaguest idea of how to do people.
  54. Wings of Desire
    Startlingly original at first, Wings of Desire is in the end damagingly overloaded. The excesses of language, the ceaseless camera movement, the unyielding whimsy have the ultimate effect of wearing the audience down. (Review of Original Release)
  55. Event Horizon
    This unwieldy amalgam of science fiction and horror, directed by Paul Anderson, douses almost every scene with glitzy special effects in a futile attempt to cover up a paucity of thought.
  56. Flubber
    Though Mr. Williams sometimes seems on the verge of "Aladdin"-caliber improvisation with the ever-morphing green flubber, the film bogs him down with a fiancee (Marcia Gay Harden) hellbent on making him remember a wedding date, and with the full Hughes retinue of thugs and bullies.
  57. Hoodlum
    And while Mr. Duke's direction has visual panache, the movie is unevenly paced.
  58. The House of Yes
    The House of Yes was adapted from a play by Wendy MacLeod. And the movie, with its brittle, outrageous dialogue has a shrill stagy feel. That would be fine, if the dialogue sustained the stylish crackle of a drawing-room comedy gone berserk, but there are many gaping holes between the funny moments.
  59. Rosewood
    The film transcends racial divisions by bestowing equally hopeless dialogue on both sides.
  60. Speed 2: Cruise Control
    Despite huge resources at Mr. De Bont's disposal and the fact that both he and Ms. Bullock have achieved stellar status since ''Speed'' screeched onto movie screens, the sequel is still a B-movie at heart.
  61. Crimson Tide
    Crimson Tide is better watched for its toy appeal and high-priced talent than for any real suspense over where Hunter's mutinous instincts will lead the story.
  62. GoldenEye
    Mr. Brosnan, as the best-moussed Bond ever to play baccarat in Monte Carlo, makes the character's latest personality transplant viable (not to mention smashingly photogenic), but the series still suffers the blahs.
  63. 101 Dalmatians
    Thanks to Glenn Close's delicious villainy, it succeeds in breathing archly theatrical life into the irresistibly monstrous Cruella DeVil. Otherwise, this remake goes to the dogs too often.
  64. Bound
    The film is shot by Bill Pope with such enterprising flair that it never looks claustrophobic, but the action inevitably stalls in such close quarters.
  65. Eraser
    Eraser means to show off the star's standard persona against a backdrop of lavish special effects, which is certainly a formula that's worked before. But this is no "Terminator," since its tricks are so much more arbitrary and over-the-top.
  66. Evita
    But the film is still breathless and shrill, since Alan Parker's direction shows no signs of a moral or political compass and remains in exhausting overdrive all the time.
  67. Dead Man
    The film's energy begins to flag after less than an hour, and as its pulse slackens it turns into a quirky allegory, punctuated with brilliant visionary flashes that partially redeem a philosophic ham-handedness.
  68. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
    The movie has the metabolism, logic and attention span of a peevish 6-year-old.
  69. The Firm
    The movie is extremely long (two hours and 34 minutes) and so slow that by the end you feel as if you've been standing up even if you've been sitting down.
  70. Mrs. Doubtfire
    The movie's biggest challenge, one that it does not exactly meet, is to persuade the audience that this husband and father's escapade is somehow an act of love.
  71. Spy Hard
    Instead of building sustained comic set pieces, it takes a machine-gun approach to humor. Without looking at where it's aiming, it opens fire and sprays comic bullets in all directions, trusting that a few will hit the bull's-eye. A few do, but many more don't.
  72. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
    In fact even the film's most dramatic moments are presented with decorousness bordering on detachment.
  73. The Long Kiss Goodnight
    Mr. Black's screenplay is mean-spirited, but it earns its keep with sharp, sarcastic dialogue and ingenious ways of setting up this story.
  74. Rob Roy
    Rob Roy is best watched for local color and for its hearty, hot-blooded stars.
  75. Freeway
    Rather than seeming classic, Freeway appears to be another film maker showcase, a derivative apprentice work.
  76. White Squall
    Despite great scenery, the distinctive visual ideas of Mr. Scott ("Alien," "Blade Runner") and the strong dramatic presence of Mr. Bridges, most of White Squall remains listless and tame.
  77. Fear
    A nasty little thriller that starts out on a somewhat higher plane but eventually trades in its level head for conventional scare tactics and violence.
  78. The Basketball Diaries
    The star shines, but the movie is hard to watch.
  79. The Hudsucker Proxy
    Stylish and witty though it is, The Hudsucker Proxy has its problems, even for Coen fans. But throughout, there are wonderfully rich touches.
  80. Nine 1/2 Weeks
    In 9 1/2 Weeks, he has created a work that might well qualify as a truly nouveau film. Here is a movie in which actors impersonating characters are blended into the decor so completely that they take on the properties of animated products, no more or less important than exquisitely photographed strawberries.[21 Feb 1986, p.C17]
    • The New York Times
  81. Wyatt Earp
    Yet a film that tries so hard to offer intelligent entertainment too often forgets to entertain. The famous showdown in Tombstone...one of the most famous scenes in all of Western legend is anti-climactic.
  82. Purple Rain
    Like many album covers, Purple Rain, though sometimes arresting to look at, is a cardboard come-on to the record it contains.
  83. Party Girl
    Party Girl aspires to be a mid-90's answer to the Susan Seidelman movies "Smithereens" and "Desperately Seeking Susan." Although it has some of the same frothy energy, it has no real story to tell.
  84. Losin' It
    Losin' It isn't without its likable moments, but it isn't overloaded with them, either.
  85. Uncommon Valor
    Action fans may well find Uncommon Valor enjoyably familiar, but for others it will smack of war movie dej a-vu, despite the new angle provided by its concern for American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam.
  86. Boomerang
    The funniest parts of this uneven, ostentatiously upscale comedy are those that find Mr. Murphy's Marcus adopting the behavior of a sexually insecure woman.
  87. Kindergarten Cop
    No one laughs at Arnold Schwarzenegger better than Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. In Kindergarten Cop, he plays off the Schwarzenegger image more gleefully and successfully than ever before. That is not quite enough to save the movie from its lame, predictable script.
  88. My Blue Heaven
    It is apparent that through most of My Blue Heaven, Steve Martin's talent is tossed away on this sketchy outline of a howlingly funny idea.
  89. What About Bob?
    What About Bob? does work as comedy for a while, thanks to the fortuitous teaming of Mr. Dreyfuss and Mr. Murray.
  90. Swing Kids
    Swing Kids looks good and moves quickly at first; later on, mired in familiar-feeling moments, it flounders
  91. Scrooged
    Scrooged works in fits and starts. The mundane demands of the sentimental story keep interrupting what are, essentially, revue sketches, a few of which are hilarious.
  92. Return to Oz
    The inventiveness that has gone into this, and into turning Oz into a land of lavish special effects, will be lost on anyone with a fondness for the 1939 musical classic. That film will always enchant adults and children alike. This joyless new Return to Oz isn't likely to appeal to the former, and may give many of the latter a good scare. Children are sure to be startled by the new film's bleakness.
  93. Legends of the Fall
    These are performances that lost too much in the editing room, smothered by music and overshadowed by a picture-postcard vision of the American West.
  94. The Black Stallion
    For all its pretty glimpses of the desert island, the film never offers a clear, overall sense of what the place looks like; neither the camera nor the boy really goes exploring.
  95. All Dogs Go to Heaven
    The appeal of character and story line here is thoroughly overshadowed by the various technical feats involved in bringing the film to the screen.
  96. The Muppet Movie
    It's also very well written by Jerry Juhl and Jack Burns and directed by James Frawley ("Kid Blue," "The Big Bus") with a comic touch that never becomes facetious.
  97. Salt
    She is the prime special effect, and a reminder that even in an era of technological overkill, movie stars matter.
  98. Jonah Hex
    Though it has bad word of mouth, Jonah Hex is generally better, sprier and more diverting than most of the action flicks now playing, "The A-Team" included.
  99. Takers
    There is plenty of nonsense, a great deal of stylish posturing and clothes-horsing, and a few action sequences that manage to be both gripping and preposterous.
  100. The Killer Inside Me
    Michael Winterbottom’s nasty and uneven adaptation of Jim Thompson’s surpassingly mean little crime novel.
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